Leverage 5 Social Media Platforms For Efficient Business Results

Social media has a become part of our life style even before we accept it. We do not even recollect the last time we wrote a hand written letter to someone. Social media has changed our habits forever and irony is that we do not even realize this. Mobiles are our devices to connect and we do not even remember the last time mobile was at arm’s distance. While earlier it used to take decades to find an old classmate, nowadays s/he is just a click away. All the information is available immediately. More than half of the planet’s population is under 30 years and now this section of people cannot even imagine life without social media sites. 95% of millennial population have joined a social network. Thus, when people are on social media platforms can businesses be far behind? Customers, co-workers, CEO’s, decision makers and 81% of B2B companies have accounts on social media sites. 93% of all business buyers are social media advocates. Radio took 38 years to reach 50 million users, TV took 13 years to reach 50 million whereas the internet took just 4 years to reach 50 million users.

How does social media impacts a business?

Social media is just another platform for communication. People come, build communities, relationships and conversations among themselves. As we are living in a time-constrained environment, where physically meeting people is slowly and gradually becoming difficult because of the distances involved, people are ever connected within their circle because of social media. People come on social media sites for spending their lighter moments of life. Businesses on the other hand can make the best use of the platforms for word of mouth publicity. Things spread like wildfire on social media platforms. People have started giving more importance to peer reviews while making a purchase decision than company guarantees. Its like returning back to good old days where an adverse experience of one customer has the potential to ruin business’ prospects because of the connected world we live in. When brands and businesses put a persistent effort in developing their brands in online space, building a reputation in online space, they definitely reap its benefits in terms of huge number of people who become its influencers. It may take time for social media to have an impact on sales figures, but its impact surely begins at the mind level. The first purpose of social media is to build awareness for brands, next follows utilizing the awareness to build preference, once preference is established brands harness it for building greater understanding of the products and in the end build loyal customers.

Facebook has 850 million monthly active users. 1 million plus websites have integrated with Facebook in various ways. 77% of B2C companies and 43% of B2B companies acquired customers from Facebook. Facebook has added 100 million users in less than 9 months. More than 25 million pieces of content are shared each month on Facebook. The number of minutes spent on Facebook per month comes to around 500 billion. It is almost 10 years that Facebook came into our lives and it seems difficult to remember our lives before it came and somehow became an integral part of it. People old and young alike use it to connect with friends and family living in distant corners of the world and regularly update them about their life’s activities. If the truth be told, relationships need constant nurturing and they die a natural death without sustained watering in the form of care, affection and love and Facebook does the same work of nurturing relationships. When business’s need to expand their reach, Facebook is the first place marketers think of.

It is estimated that around 332 million professionals use LinkedIn. It adds 2 members per second. It receives almost 12 million unique visitors per day and 187 million unique visitors in a month. Executives from all Fortune 500 companies are on LinkedIn. It covers somewhere around 200 countries and territories. 40% of professionals check their LinkedIn account daily. Top CEOs on an average have 930 connections.

Twitter has 284 million monthly active users. 100 million are daily active users. More than 600 million search takes place on twitter everyday. Average time per month spent by users on Twitter is 170 minutes. 6 % of its users use it at least once a day. 30% of its users check Twitter multiple times a day. Top 3 countries on Twitter are USA, Brazil and Japan. 34 % of marketers have generated leads using Twitter. 77 % of Fortune Global 100 companies have a Twitter account. We have now into a habit of tweeting almost anything ranging from the day’s news to recent discoveries.

Pinterest was launched in March 2010. Pinterest is used by 70 million people worldwide, 80% of whom are women, of this 20% women are from the US which is in sharp comparison of just 5% men from the US are using Pinterest. Average time spent on Pinterest comes close to fifteen minutes per visit. 9 million of Pinterest users have connected their accounts to Facebook. While Pinterest hit 10 million US monthly unique visitors faster than any independent site in history. It has experienced 2702.2% increase in total unique visitors since May 2011. 25% of Fortune Global companies have Pinterest accounts. Pinterest has 500000 business accounts. 52 % of its daily users consult it before buying in a store. 27% of its users follow at least one brand on it. Average sales order value referred by Pinterest users is $58.95. 47% of US online shoppers brought something as a result of Pinterest recommendation. Average number of website visits as a result of pins is 2. Pinterest’s share of global e-commerce social sharing is 44%. 35 % of all its unique visitors every day are mobile only. 75% of all its traffic comes through mobile apps.

Google Plus has 500 million plus registered users and some 300 million are active users. It is estimated that Google Plus has 20 million unique mobile monthly users. Somewhere around 40% marketers use Google Plus and 70% of marketers are willing to learn increasing Google Plus activities.

1 billion people use YouTube. Total YouTube view by 2011 was 1 trillion. YouTube experiences 4 billion video views everyday. 6 billion hours of video is watched on YoutubeYouTube every month. 100 hours of video is uploaded on YouTube every minute. 1 Billion of average Youtube mobile video views per day. 40 % of YouTube traffic is from mobile devices.

The crux of presenting all these numbers is to prove a simple point- that our lives have changed and that to forever with introduction of social networks and suggestively for better. Change is the only constant we human lives have and social media is very much a part of that change. We all as customers, businesses, professionals, students must embrace this change kindheartedly and leverage it to make our lives more efficient.